In the past, marketing has been looked at as more of an art than a science. Marketers would create advertising and content and have limited ways to measure the return on the investment. In today’s age, we see marketing has become more quantitative through marketing analysis with an effort to prove a return on investment of advertising and consumer engagement. Metrics typically include impressions, clicks, cost per click, overall spend, likes, comments, video viewings, etc. However, as marketing continues to evolve, it will be critical to take qualitative and quantitative results into consideration when optimizing marketing strategy.
An opportunity for development is the intersection of advertising, metrics, and consumer behavior. If we analyze specific customer interactions with advertising released into the market, we will gain more insight as to what occurs as the customer engages with the brand initially. Why is it that consumers clicked more on this advertisement versus the other advertisement? Did we change the colors or the content and what resonated more? After the customer’s initial interaction with the brand, we must understand the customer journey on the site. We can continue to release advertising in-market but if customers are not converting due to a poor customer experience online, the return on investment from marketing will fail to reflect in the conversion metrics. After all, what is marketing without the sales conversion?
Metrics like sales and clicks tend to be tangible, but at the end of the day the measurement is based on a series of behaviors conducted by humans. In behavioral economics, we analyze psychological, emotional, cultural, and social norms. These factors also influence how people react to marketing and consume products. For example, “The Power of Free” automatically makes the human brain perceive something as exciting and better. If a promotion is Buy 1, Get 1 Free, people are more inclined to respond to this messaging versus a discount of 50% on 2 items. If consumers are more likely to purchase from this type of deal, how can we leverage that behavioral play to drive conversion and price products higher to capitalize on such a deal?
Additionally, we continue to see increasing customization options (i.e., designing your own Tesla car, home security systems, other package bundles, etc.) We as consumers believe we like to have choice, however too many choices can become an issue. Consumers may face decision paralysis when presented with an overabundance of options, thus overwhelming the decision-making process, and resulting in no purchase at all. Conducting research on what aspects of the customization is mentally overwhelming may help marketers to better understand what may be occurring within the customer journey experience and how it impacts company marketing efforts and conversion.
Another concept is social proof, which is where consumers look to their peers when it comes to purchasing. Consideration is in the middle of the marketing funnel and when considering the consumption of a product, we typically look at reviews or to people we know and trust. This is important because maintaining brand consistency and interactions across all channels can really make or break an experience, and word of mouth travels quickly. As influencer campaigns become more prominent and specific return on investment is still a grey area, we would need to measure influencer’s involvement in marketing campaigns and how they drive behavioral shifts among their social followings. This could potentially be done through pre-survey and post-survey collections.
These behavioral aspects are not always easy to measure when it comes to traditional marketing metrics. Typically, it requires extensive market research through focus groups, interviews, surveys, conducting testing, etc. However, leveraging behavioral knowledge when planning marketing campaigns and strategy can help improve marketing metric performance. To understand the full marketing picture, it’s important to analyze the qualitative and quantitative aspects to tell the story of what is occurring with our marketing data.